


Green Water

by Filigree



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AO3 1 Million, F/M, Filigree and her damn deathfics, Heart Attack, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Not Iron Man 3 Compliant, Tony's last attempt, no happy ending, suicidal ideations, triple mascara alert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 11:49:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Filigree/pseuds/Filigree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the very end, Tony remembers surfing</p>
            </blockquote>





	Green Water

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Reap What You Sow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/998020) by [singingwithoutwords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singingwithoutwords/pseuds/singingwithoutwords). 



> Please don't hate me for posting a deathfic on Valentine's Day. I agonized over letting this one out, because I know my fluff fans are going to run from it. But there are two stories that have prompted this one ever since I first read them, and I can't get rid of this AU take on how Tony might react to a worst case scenario.
> 
> The inspirations are 'Reap What You Sow' by Singingwithoutwords http://archiveofourown.org/works/998020/chapters/1975517
> 
> and 'Guess This Is Our Reward' by Frostiron_OTP http://archiveofourown.org/works/806356
> 
> So if you have problems with a character's low-self esteem, horrible self-care, and passive suicide, PLEASE DON'T READ THIS. It's really dark and it doesn't have a happy ending.
> 
> On the other hand, I did start out in fan fiction by answering the challenge 'You write such sweet silly stuff, I bet you couldn't write a deathfic'. So I wrote a dozen of them.

A month and five days after That Night, after five people in a limousine broke his patched-together heart, Tony feels a new pain in his chest just to the left of the arc reactor.

He knows what it probably is. He’s been monitoring that part of his body almost religiously since Afghanistan. He’s already reaching for his StarkPad, ready to call up Pepper, Rhodey, doctors, ambulance drivers. Ready to prep an ICU in one of the fancy hospitals that have benefited publicly and privately from his money over the years.

But Tony’s fingers stop four inches above the tablet.

The odds of him coming safely out of heart surgery decrease every year. His heart tissue and immune system are still hideously compromised from the palladium poisoning. It’s already knocked at least ten years off his lifespan, though only he and a couple of doctors know that. Even though medical technology has advanced, Tony knows the chances of surviving a heart transplant now are not much more than sixty percent in his favor.

So, he thinks, now what?

He’ll wait it out. If it goes away, he might do something about it tomorrow. He doesn’t think he has until tomorrow.

But is this so bad?

This way he doesn’t have to down booze and pills, kiss a gun, take razors to his wrist veins again, drop out of the sky, or take out the reactor. He can just wait. Time and bad luck will do everything else for him.

Thing is, he doesn’t feel terribly guilty. Pepper and Rhodey will be disappointed in him, but they’ll probably be relieved to be rid of him, too.

His will is up to date. Rhodey helped him remove the Avengers from the generous bequests they’d formerly had. Tony never had the chance to tell them they’d been his heirs. Now, they’ll simply never know. The company is safe, locked to Pepper’s guidance and some clever ironclad legal trusts. His best legacy – the one that will save humanity if some greedy or religious idiots don’t ruin his plans – is not Iron Man, but the reactor technology. He’s left his mark. He can go, knowing that.

But if Tony’s going to get away with this, he has to enlist the bots and Jarvis.

“Jarvis, family meeting in the workshop in five, ‘kay?”

“Yes, Sir. Might I ask what this is about, Sir?”

“I’ll tell you when I tell the boys.”

Five minutes later, he tells them. Tony lets the bots panic and spin about, lets his AI’s icy, horrified disapproval beat harmlessly against his resolve. They can’t alert anyone else, not with the lockdown protocols he’d enacted when he closed the workshop doors.

He tells them he loves them, but he’s not like them. He can’t upload himself into a new body. Tony and his boys haven’t got that far in their research, and they are decades, if not centuries, ahead of anyone else studying human persona transfers to digital substrates. They don’t have time now. He tells them why he’s ready. He’s done what he could, Rhodey and Pepper have done what they could, and it’s not enough. Tony is tired. Now he wants to rest.

His chest hurts more. Still talking, holding his left arm close to his side, he yanks an eight-foot length of clear wrapping plastic off its roll, then drapes it over his favorite adjustable shop chair. He was the Merchant of Death, never shocked by pictures of what his weapons could do to fragile flesh. As an Avenger, he’s seen death even closer. He wants to keep things tidy for the people who will find his body, when the impenetrable workshop doors finally unlock two hours after his heart stops.

Or when he wakes up in the morning. If this thing doesn't happen after all. He wonders if he'll feel disappointed, if he wakes up.  
  
Tony strips off his clothes and folds them on the nearest clean table. Everything but a modest pair of gray boxers. He slides into the chair. The plastic crinkles, sticking to his clammy skin. A nudge at the arm controls, and the chair unfolds into a lounger. With his right hand, he tucks the extra plastic up around him. Like a spa wrap, like that place in Malibu he and Pepper used to visit when he was just an irresponsible billionaire.

The bots understand finally: this is happening. They move in to touch him, carefully clasping his plastic-wrapped arms in strong, delicate pincers.

Jarvis understands. He says only, “This is intention number five hundred and forty-eight, Sir, and attempt number seventeen.”

“Six hundred and eleven on intentions, and attempt number twenty-three, buddy,” Tony wheezes. “There were a few moments before you and the boys came online.”

“When was the first, Sir?” Jarvis is gentle, cooling the air so the sweaty nausea isn’t so bad, dimming the lights to a kinder twilight.

“I thought about it when I was seven,” Tony said. “Mom had all those sleeping pills. But old Jarvis found me staring at them, and sat me down for cocoa instead…”

“Oh, Sir,” says Jarvis, and for a moment Tony doesn’t remember if it’s the kind old man or the loyal AI speaking.

He loses his train of thought in a stronger pulse of pain. He’s learned how to deal with pain over the years, when he consents, when he has time to ease into it. This isn’t the worst pain he’s ever felt. He can outlast this, he does, until his body thinks he’s in a scene and kicks in all those trained endorphins. Just like it should have happened That Night, except that he was too drunk to explain properly. Things happened too fast.

Rape was bad enough in an MIT dorm, in Ty Stone’s penthouse, in an Afghani cave. It’s worse when it comes from people he thought he really loved, whom he thought loved him.

He’d been drunk and stupid, and paid for it. If he hadn’t been, maybe he could have spent the last month being loved and in love. Being mourned tomorrow. The fantasy flares up in gorgeous colors and shapes. But he recognizes it for wishful thinking. A lie. He will not go down believing in a lie, even one he still wants to be true.

He can still feel the pain in his chest, but the endorphins are lifting him above it. He almost doesn’t feel his heart breaking all over again, or it doesn’t matter anymore.

The pain crests again and again, and Tony lets himself slide into its undertow. He thinks of surfing cold waves off Malibu, before water became a bad thing, a trigger. Towers of glorious green water flashing in sunlight. The illusion of flight, hurled forward by unnumbered tons of ocean dragging along a rising continental shelf.

He thinks of good things. Pepper’s hair. Rhodey’s smile. The bots. Jarvis, who will weave Tony’s mandates across every piece of StarkTech in the world, and every corner of Stark Industries.

He sees a pair of puzzled, oddly familiar sea-green eyes lock onto his gaze, across universes and times. The eyes widen. He has a sense of something else reaching frantically toward him, trying to cross the gap, to speed him along or stop him. A sense of possibilities…

But Tony can’t be stopped now. The wave has him, green water and white foam at his feet, at his back. No rocks ahead, just endless water and sunlight.

When his heart breaks for the last time, he feels it for only a moment. Before, he’d wondered if death would feel like the Chitauri wormhole. The tunnel vision is the same, but this is a softer fall, as the eternal wave spills around him. Almost gentle. An earned peace.

He thinks: the good kind of oblivion. He thinks: green water.

Then he stops thinking.


End file.
